De-clouding is going to be a huge trend as companies are pressured to save costs, and they realize on-prem is still a fraction of the cost of comparable cloud services.
This whole cloud shift has been one of the most mind-blowing shared delusions in the industry, and I'm glad I've mostly avoided working with it outright.
The thing that gets me about it is the very real physical cost of all this cloud waste.
The big cloud providers have clear cut thousands of acres in Ohio, Northern VA, and elsewhere to build their huge windowless concrete bunkers in support of this delusion of unlimited scale.
Hopefully as the monetary costs become clear their growth will be reversed and these bunkers can be torn down
Much more than efficient. You think AWS is getting the same CPU normal civilians get? No way dude. Those guys are big enough that they can get custom hardware just for their specific needs. They’re cooling systems, power systems, everything is way more efficient. And they are big enough they can afford to measure every single metric that matters and optimize every one.
For what it's worth, large providers will always need datacenters. But perhaps datacenters run by public cloud providers today will be sold off to larger businesses running their own infrastructure someday at a discount. Most of the infrastructure itself all will age out in five or ten years, and would've been replaced either way.
Heck, datacenters in Virginia are likely to end up being sold directly to the federal government.
Our firm started the big cloud initiative last year. We have our own datacenters already, but all the cool startups used cloud. Our managers figure it'll make us cool too.
This sort of thing is absolutely insane. Like, sure, small office, no existing datacenter infrastructure, it might make sense to bootstrap your business on someone else's cloud. But if you literally have a cooled room and an existing network infrastructure, it's absolutely silly to spend money on using someone else's.
Something I feel like these conversations seem to miss is that it is not binary; you don't have to host hardware on-prem if you don't want to be in AWS. There are other clouds. There are Sungards of the world were you can pay for racks of managed hardware. There are a lot of options between buying and managing your own hardware and AWS.
This whole cloud shift has been one of the most mind-blowing shared delusions in the industry, and I'm glad I've mostly avoided working with it outright.